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Rancher Labs vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.5
Rancher Labs provides efficient open-source solutions like OpenShift with significant cost savings and an eight out of ten rating.
Sentiment score
7.8
Red Hat OpenShift boosts productivity, scalability, and efficiency, enhancing deployment and reducing costs through containerization and streamlined cloud transitions.
With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
Rancher Labs' customer service and technical support are praised for responsiveness, with users valuing community forums for assistance.
Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support varies; praised for premium service and community help, criticized for slow responses and complex documentation.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
Red Hat's technical support is good, and I would rate it a nine out of ten.
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Rancher Labs offers robust scalability for small to large teams, with effective deployment and minor automation improvements suggested.
Sentiment score
7.6
Red Hat OpenShift is praised for scalability, dynamic scaling, and seamless integration, though some seek competitive improvements.
OpenShift is highly scalable, allowing us to manage thousands of pods effectively.
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.7
Rancher Labs is praised for its stability and reliability, though users note complexity and upgrade challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat OpenShift is highly rated for stability and reliability, with improvements in version 4.x enhancing performance for production use.
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
 

Room For Improvement

Rancher Labs needs improved stability, integrations, user-friendly features, enhanced security, multicloud support, and better community and development resources.
Red Hat OpenShift requires enhanced documentation, simplified configuration, improved integration, better security, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
Integration with tools like Grafana and Prometheus is necessary for capturing logs.
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
 

Setup Cost

Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective open-source container orchestration with optional paid support, seen as competitively mid-range priced.
Red Hat OpenShift pricing is high but offers value and scalability, with costs justified by support and integration benefits.
Initially, licensing was per CPU, with a memory cap, but the price has doubled, making it difficult to justify for clients with smaller compute needs.
The cost of OpenShift is very high, particularly with the OpenShift Plus package, which includes many products and services.
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
 

Valuable Features

Rancher Labs offers user-friendly Kubernetes management, seamless integrations, and supports GitOps and virtual machine management with promising potential.
Red Hat OpenShift excels in deployment, automation, security, and integration, offering multi-cloud flexibility and strong customer support.
The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.
Compared to other Kubernetes solutions, OpenShift is more enterprise-oriented.
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
 

Categories and Ranking

Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (3rd)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Rancher Labs is 8.9%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 1.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
Mikhael Ibrahim - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities
Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
25%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware and others in Container Management. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.